


What Has Bread Got To Do With Wedding Cake?

by herebewyverns



Category: The Slipper and the Rose (1976)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Be Careful What You Wish For, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Not How You Planned It, Not a Happy Enging, There is a Happy Enging, just..., well ...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-26
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-11-13 10:43:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18030227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herebewyverns/pseuds/herebewyverns
Summary: 'The Slipper and the Rose' is one of my all-time favourite retellings of the Cinderella story, and possibly one of my all-time favourite films! But every time I watch it, I think to myself of all the pain that would have been caused had the story not had a happy ending.This is just a few perspectives of a world where the King got his wish and Prince Edward married the lady of his father’s choosing.Many thanks towritteninhastewho was a fantastic beta for this endeavour!





	1. The Princess

She already knew the story before she married the prince.

No one had meant for her to find out, she was sure, but she had never been a stupid woman. All of Euphrania’s court seemed to be at once desperate to tell her something and keen to keep something from her. Perhaps, she mused years later, they had meant to be kind? Perhaps they had relished knowing something she had not? In any case, despite the King’s efforts, her maids had caught whispers, and then they’d asked questions and then they had brought her the answers.

The man she was to marry had loved another lady. Had met her at the self-same ball that Vivienne had met the prince, had danced with her and lost his heart to her and then lost the lady. Had lost her _twice_ , it was said.

When Vivienne had first heard the story, she had been relieved, foolish simpleton that she had been.

She thought she was prepared. She thought they’d be able to work past it.

Men fell in love as easily as they fell out of it after all. And besides, what did love had to do with getting married? They were royalty after all, and it was expected that their parents would choose their spouses according to alliances and politics.

She had been so very wrong, and now there was nothing she could do.

*

The wedding had gone without a single hitch - not that she or her father had expected any differently, of course. Euphrania had needed the alliance just as much as they, after all.

The service was interminably long, as they always were; the dress was heavy as she processed first up the aisle and then back down it; the feast was excellent. Her groom was handsome, and she caught many envious looks from the court’s matrons as they eyed her place next to Prince Edward, filled as it was by herself and not their own daughters.

As the evening drew on there was dancing and the prince – no, _Edward_ , he was her husband now after all – Edward had proven to be as skilled a dancer as he had at the Ball.

Vivienne had once called the Ball the highlight of all her memories; she’d been so excited after her father had accepted the invitation!

Vivienne had known that she was starting to lose something in the way of youthfulness, as the years passed by without a marriage proposal carried through to the conclusion. She’d started to avoid mirrors, fearful of catching sight of some new wrinkle, or a blemish from age’s remorseless work. But with the Ball’s invitation she happily twirled in front of every mirror in the house, twirling her skirts and imagining catching the prince’s eye!

He was very discerning, they said, not just any lady would do. _Seven_ courts he had visited, to catch a sight of their eligible princesses, and never an offer of marriage. Some might have called such behaviour proud and arrogant, but Vivienne knew that he was looking for someone special, and was she not special? Her mother had told her so, when Vivienne had been younger, and her father had always agreed.

Her ladies-in-waiting wrote to friends, family, and connections that they had to find out more about him, his likes and dislikes. It was said that he wished for a young lady, not the aging flowers in Karrolsvelt or Lichtenstein. That he was friendly to all, but seasoned courtiers had noticed him struggling to conceal his boredom in the face of idle twitterings and that he considered an excess of show and pageantry to be distasteful.

Vivienne nurtured her private hopes. She had great skills in conversation, from music and literature to plays and horses. She might not be in her first flush of youth, but neither was she nearly so old as half of the maidens who had received invitations also. Prince Edward himself was not so very young these days, perhaps they were of an age? Yes, all in all, Vivienne felt that they would suit each other very well.

And then there had been the Princess Incognita’s arrival, and all of Vivienne’s dreams had come crumbling down, although she had not entirely understood so at the time. Now Vivienne’s mind shied away from memories of the Ball, the way her eyes had once avoided a glimpse of those mirrors. There was only pain in the looking, after all.

*

She waited up for him on their wedding night, sat nervously in her bed in her newly stitched nightgown. She waited up for hours wondering what could be keeping him. Was she meant to go to his room?

In the end, in the small hours of the night, she crept out of her bed and started to open the door, intent on seeking him out. It was unfair that no one had warned her that in Euphrania, the bride sought the groom’s bed on their wedding night, but then again many things about her new home had been unfair.

What was one more?

She was out in the corridor before the flaw in her plan becomes apparent: she had no idea where her husband’s bedchamber lies.

Defeated she went back to bed and sits alone in the dark until morning brings a chambermaid to her room. The girl looks puzzled when she sees Vivienne still in her own bed and alone, but she curtsies well enough before taking her leave. Vivienne’s maids come to dress her, all of them sharing in an awkward silence: why had the prince not come?

“Perhaps he over-indulged in the wine, madam?” One of the braver girls ventured.

Vivienne nodded, accepting the easy answer without question. There is a voice in her head whispering that Prince Edward had barely drunk anything the night before – had barely eaten anything too come to that.

Still, there was no use in worrying about it now.

“If you wanted me to come to your bed, husband, you really ought to have told me where to find you.” Vivienne attempts to tease him a little, later that morning when they are finally alone.

 Prince Edward looks confused for a moment, before he stiffened and looked grave. It occurs to Vivienne that perhaps the prince is shy, and would rather not speak of such things, but really they must address these things early or the tension will continue to grow.

“My apologies, Madam. I certainly would rather that you did not come to my rooms, if you please. They are the last remnants I have left of a private kingdom-” He stops, swallows and changes his words “-of a private space.”

Vivienne nods, though she does not understand at all.

“So I am to wait for you then, my lord?”

There is the faint, bitter ghost of a smile on the prince’s face, she thinks, but Vivienne cannot be sure before the prince turns away to stare out of the window.

“As the sole feature of this match which has been left to my choosing, I fancy that you may be waiting for some time, madam. I would urge you not to stay up waiting.”

The new knight, Sir John, enters the room then, preventing whatever words Vivienne might have found from the depths of her shock in response. To his minuscule credit, Sir John seems to be aware that he has interrupted something, but he forges ahead regardless. It seems that the prince’s cousin, the Duke of Montague, wishes to speak with him.

Vivienne has been a lady of court her entire life: she knows a diplomatic rescue when she sees it. Above the affront she feels, there is puzzlement. Why should the prince need to be rescued from her?

And above all else are the words she has been forced to swallow back down, chalky and bitter. _What of my choice in this? What about what I want?_

She doubts there would have been an answer.

*

Outside of her husband’s bedroom window stands a small monument – a column of stone topped with a glass case. The glass on one side is smashed-in, and whatever it once held has been taken from it, but the monument still stands.

Vivienne had only taken notice of it because of the way the servants had gathered around it, holding their children up in their arms to get a better look and talking amongst themselves. She’d seen the way they would glance up at their prince’s window, and then look back at the glass case with sadness in their eyes.

Vivienne had only made the mistake once of asking her husband about the glass case. He had not answered, but his eyes had been cold and hard as he gazed at her, and it was the closest that she ever came to seeing her husband show any true emotion in her presence. He had stormed out of the room leaving her and their breakfast untouched, had taken his companion-at-arms and gone riding for the whole day, leaving her to make excuses for his absence at court. The King and Queen had not been pleased, she knew, and she was sure that they blamed her for their son’s dereliction of duty. Perhaps they were right to think so.

Edward refused to receive her in his rooms after that day. Oh, he never outright said as much, but Vivienne had not been a princess herself all her life without knowing how to pick up unspoken cues. If she wished to break her fast in his company, then they must do so elsewhere.

Vivienne turns once again to her maids to find out the truth.

_Why is the monument important?_

_What did it contain?_

_Who took the object inside it? Where did it go?_

When she finds out, there is a moment when she is deeply sorry for her husband. To have searched for so long without success for his love, to find her at last when all hope had been lost at last and then to have her taken from him again?

She understands now why the servants whisper so in the corridors, why the whispers have not died down despite the royal wedding and the month thereafter it. This story is far too good to be forgotten like that.

Vivienne would be far more understanding still were she not inhabiting the unwelcome place of an intruder in the tragic tale of lost love. She is a flesh and blood woman, warm to the touch and filled with life, and all Edward has left of The Girl is stone and broken glass. Why should he cling to her so when the memory of her can only hurt him?

In time, Vivienne thinks that Edward looks only ever to the monument because it is the only thing which is as cold and rigid as he: hard and unyielding and frigid. Her maids do not tell her, but Vivienne overhears the tales of others anyway, speaking of Prince Edward as having been a warm, laughing kindly man. Given to playing jokes with his friend Sir John, and dreaming of romantic adventures.

Vivienne chooses to believe that these are lies. The alternative is to accept that she has married a shell of that man; it is better to believe that he never existed.

*

Vivienne was not a stupid woman, and she knew when she was being lied to.

Oh, she had to admit that she was not _outright_ lied to – no one lied to her face when they said that Prince Edward’s unsuitable love was sent away and out of the country. No one said as much to her _directly_.

But a lie told to her maids so that they may tell that lie to her unknowingly was still a lie.

It all makes sense to her now, of course. Naturally the prince would not have fallen in love with some servant girl or country nobody, the daughter of a dead minor lord (the reports had always been vague and confusing). Of course he had fallen for a lady of the court, a woman of high breeding and sufficient favour to be the lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Queen. The Lady Caroline must have thought her future was secure as future queen, and Vivienne is viciously glad to imagine the lady’s heartbreak on learning that she would never marry the prince, that he was meant for higher things.

Perhaps the lady had lost her virtue to her royal lover? It certainly would have explained a hasty marriage to a newly knighted royal bodyguard, after all. A man with no lands, no fortune and no influence outside of his friendship with his prince.

It was said that the prince himself had promoted the match, possibly –as Vivienne suspected – so that his father could _not_ send his lady-love from his side. The best lies had a grain of truth inside them, did they not?

But these are still lies, and Vivienne will not be played for a fool.

She cannot send the woman from court, she knows. The Lady Caroline is a well-loved figure, popular with the other ladies and well-thought of by the lords. Vivienne does not yet have sufficient favour to move against her so obviously. Instead she takes to surveying the guest-lists for tea parties, luncheons and dinners. Whenever she can, she removes Lady Caroline and her husband from the invitations, and when she cannot, she places the pair as far from the royal table as she can.

Prince Edward, a man who has never been taught to read such things, does not notice. Other courtiers do, and Vivienne smiles to herself behind her wine glass, satisfied when the whispers begin.

Unfortunately, Vivienne has reckoned without the Dowager Queen, an ancient old woman with no care for the opinions of others at all. When Vivienne first met her, she had peered through weak eyes at a nervous young bride in a foreign land and then snorted gracelessly.

“Really Charles, if your scheming _must_ continue to lack originality, could it not have at _least_ involved a measure of wit? At least the other gel had charm to her.”

The room had taken in a shocked gasp, but the king had merely pretended not to hear and the moment had passed. It had been the comment which led to Vivienne send her maids to find out about the other woman, and Vivienne has never forgotten the Dowager’s slight.

It seemed that the Dowager Queen is not yet done making Vivienne’s life miserable, as illustrated when the old woman surveys the seating for the luncheon in honour of the Duke of Montague’s birthday.

“Really child, I don’t know who you expect me to talk to if you insist on seating my lay-in-waiting all the way across the room.”

Vivienne seeks inside herself for dignity. “I cannot help that my husband’s mistress continues to have a place at court, but I am not at all required to speak with the woman.”

The Dowager Queen is silent for a moment and Vivienne thinks that she has shocked her by knowing and owning the truth. Then the old woman snorts gracelessly, and begins to laugh a creaking withered laugh.

“Oh child! Just when I think I have seen the most foolishness this court can manage to produce!” Still chuckling, she patted Vivienne’s arm. It was not at all comforting. “Well, well, my foolish gel, if you really must take your frustrations out on the innocent, at least Caroline is well-defended. Have your little tantrum, child.”

Vivienne watched her walk away, and wondered why nothing ever made sense in this strange place. She does not relent in her bid to side-line the lady Caroline, and one day her husband _does_ notice. His fury is all that she had feared it might be, cold and sharp and cutting as steel. Vivienne argues back that she will not be so dishonoured and it is only then that she discovers her mistake.

Vivienne always wondered whether having her husband confirm the whispers of his lost love would ache less than the wondering. It is infinitely worse, it turns out. His words cut her to ribbons and he leaves her alone in the library to bleed her heartbreak out onto the floor. He leaves her to comfort the real wife of his best friend, his only two friends left in the world.

*

The Queen – she will never be Mother to Vivienne, and she never offers such an endearment either – reminds her often of her duty to provide heirs. It has been two years now, and there has been no sign of a child. The Queen, it is well-known, might only have brought her husband and king one living son, but it certainly had not been for the want of trying.

Vivienne knows that the servants talk, that they have kept a close eye on her bed-linens and know for a fact that there has never been anyone other than Vivienne herself sleeping within them. Her maidenhead is still intact after all these months and months of marriage, and the marriage remains unconsummated.

The Queen looks at her with disapproval, badly disguised as concern. It is not Vivienne’s fault if her lord husband will not come to her, will not do his duty! Vivienne does not know how to seduce a man, and she refuses to debase herself and try. Let him stay away if he likes!

And yet…

Two years becomes four and Vivienne can hear the whispers at court that grow and become stronger, sniggers that become giggles that become laughter. She knows that they are mocking her, these nobles who have never taken to her. She is a foreign bride spurned even by her own husband for company, and the ladies at court are only too willing to remember for her that the prince had chosen a woman of his own people to marry.

 _Just as he should have_ , they sniff as Vivienne passes by in her favourite gowns with their high waistlines and higher collars, so different from their own.

 _At least the prince had good taste_ , they murmur when someone makes a half-reference to The Girl that the prince had loved so much and lost so tragically.

Vivienne wants to rail at them all. To call out their blatant hypocrisy for what it is. These people would never have accepted The Girl as their queen either, some nobody, who came out of nowhere, without connections, influence or wealth. The Girl would not have been perfect and it is unfair of them all too constantly hold her up to be such; to constantly compare Vivienne with some impossible ideal who doubtless never existed.

But that is not what matters.

The Girl is not here, she was spirited away like a dream in the night, to be gone by dawn. The Girl is a fantasy to these people, and fantasies are always better than reality, are they not?

Vivienne is not a spirit of dreaming, and she is cold in her reality.


	2. The King

It was a terrible thing for a father, to have your own child refuse to forgive you.

King Charles VI had ruled his kingdom well, for the most part. He had taken the wife of his family’s choosing and although they neither of them had ever loved the other, they were fond enough of each other and they had raised a strong and healthy son. Whatever passion had existed in the early years of their marriage had dimmed after many disappointments in their efforts to provide young Edward with brothers and sisters, but they had an heir, and that was the vital thing.

When Charles had made the final, difficult decision to separate Edward from the pretty country-girl he had brought before the whole court and declared as his future wife, Charles had known in his heart of hearts that it had been the right choice. It had been a hard choice, yes, for Charles had not seen his son desperately unhappy since the boy was still in short trousers and he did not relish the thought of seeing it once again.

He had been prepared for his son to rant and rave at the unfairness of the real world: Charles was never under the impression that theirs was a family given to quiet, solemn listening, but rather to charging forth towards a goal at full-speed. Edward had chosen his own path, and had committed to it entirely; public announcements made, tokens of intent exchanged, everything; to be turned aside from his chosen course of action so abruptly would inevitably result in displays of anger and frustration. The Lord Chamberlain had been expecting something of the kind also, judging by the way that several of the kingdom’s more priceless and fragile artefacts had been carefully removed from the library, Charles’s own study and several of the rooms in the royal family’s private apartments.

And to some extent, they had been quite correct.

As soon as Edward had discovered that the girl, Cinderella, was not in her rooms, that her maids had vanished with her, and that the rooms had been stripped bare of any signs of her, he had known. He had called at once for his horse, had charged off with only his most trusted men, the new companion-at-arms – Wilber, was that the lad’s names? – forsaken without a thought for the experienced assistance of John. The people had cheered for him as he cantered through the streets and away into the distance, sure that their prince would find and return with his lady-love as he had done before.

But Charles had been more cunning than a country-house chit, and this time she had been hidden too well and too far away. He knew that his son would find only failure and frustration, and he waited for the prince’s return with uneasy anticipation.

It would have been better, he thought afterwards, if Edward had shouted. If he had raged and screamed and thrown priceless objects around. It would have been better for him to have vented his anger all at once and had done with it.

Prince Edward returned that afternoon, as Charles had expected. But he returned a changed man, lit from within not by the light of love - with which he had glowed so fiercely only one day before – but by the burning glow of righteous anger… and that anger was a quiet, banked thing.

He never raised his voice. He refused to hear his father’s explanations – and what kind of father deigns to explain his decisions to his offspring? Certainly Charles’s father, Augustus, had not! – and yet he had accepted his fate with calm resignation… and with vengeance.

 _To play his part until the altar and no further_ , he had said. Charles’s royal line would die with his son, he promised. And Charles did not doubt his son’s word, not in that moment.

But what was there to be done? Charles had not sent the girl away on an idle whim and the alliance still needed to be made, needed to be cemented.

Charles voiced his concerns to his queen that evening, and the careful pause before she took a seat beside him told him that she too was worried. Edward might be rash, he might be headstrong, but would he really doom their royal line and the security of a strong, secure succession like this?

 _It will all turn out right_ , his queen advised him after some thought. Edward was a young man like any other, and deprived of his first choice of bride, he would nevertheless change his mind and take to his marital duties with the bride he was given. He would not be able to resist forever, after all, and the queen would impress upon the girl the need for seduction to encourage their son to take his place in her marriage-bed.

But Edward did not relent.

And he did not forgive.

King Charles VI is frail now, aged by time and care. His queen has left him already for the world beyond, leaving behind her a hole in his life which was both larger and smaller than expected. And before her went all of his old counsellors; irritating nitwits though they might have been, their sons had been more foolish still and what excuse did they have for blithering on about nonsense as they did, since senility was out of the question?

The court looks to his son for leadership now, and Edward has risen well to the challenge. Charles cannot fault him there, as even he had admitted to his Lord Chamberlain before he passed away also.

All the energy that Edward had once put into dreaming of his romantic notions has instead been firmly redirected into governance, as Charles had always wanted. His policies are both popular and effective, the country prospers and the people are happy. Their neighbours are all at peace, lulled into good alliances with trade agreements and good will.

Charles had commended his son, once, about his successes. Edward had bestowed his father with the same cold, sad look of resignation with which he had gazed on the world since that day, years before. He had been silent for a moment, before coldly remarking that he had always been better at finding things others had overlooked.

Charles had not been able to hold that sad gaze and had hurriedly changed the subject, never to return to it.

If only Edward had allowed his father to _explain_ , Charles would think to himself. But as the years go on and the silence between father and son continues unabated, Charles wonders whether he truly _could_ have explained? Maybe not. So many things seemed so much clearer then, he was so _sure_ that this had been the right thing to do.

And now…

Now Charles just wants to see his son smiling again. To see him look at his parents with the fond exasperation that he was not nearly so good at concealing as he obviously thought, instead of that cold, sad pained look he carries now.


	3. The Servant

John has always been a servant, and becoming a knight of the realm did not change that. Even his role as a companion of the prince does not change much, save for those frequent times when Ed shoos him off to spend time with Caroline and “be happy enough for the both of us.”

Caroline is as wonderful as John had ever dreamed, moreso in fact! She never complains when John spends all day with Ed, dragging him off to go riding, hunting, fishing, anything to get him out of the palace. In fact, whenever she is free from her own duties she starts to join them on their outings, trying to see her prince in the same casually fond way that John always has.

“We got our happy ending, John,” she will say late at night as they curl up together under the heavy covers. “Edward (she has stopped calling Ed ‘the prince’ when she realised that it made John uncomfortable), he will never get his back, and so of course we must do everything we can to help.”

John can’t help but kiss her; she’s far too perfect not to be kissed for such kindness. She doesn’t seem to mind at all.

*

Ed, now permanently deprived of his true love, finally surrenders to his father’s will and marries the princess he is presented with.

John takes no small pleasure in how defeated the King looks in his victory.

A bride is chosen, she arrives at court and everyone tries not to tell the poor woman that she has stepped into shoes for too big and too perfect for her reality to fill. There are enough people who are unhappy in the face of pragmatism defeating romantic hopes and dreams, there need not be another added to that score any earlier than need be.

They dress for the wedding, and John stands guard as Ed prays not to his god but to a woman he must now betray. He stands behind Ed at the altar, and never manages to shake off the feeling that something ought to happen. Surely there will be a last-minute miracle and love will conquer all?

But the wedding continues without a hitch, and the only sign that John’s instincts are not entirely tricking him is seen when the ceremony is complete and they turn to face the congregation. There, tucked away between a guard and a pillar is a woman in blue who John just _knows_ is not meant to be there. Alone in a sea of faces aglow with forced smiles, she looks sad and disappointed and even, if John is not badly mistaken, deeply frustrated. John cannot imagine what the woman has to feel frustrated about in a royal wedding, but she catches him watching her and between one blink of the eye and the next she is gone. John asks around at the feast with her description and no one recognises her.

He is forced to abandon the mystery, but sometimes he takes comfort in someone sharing his conviction that this was not how things were meant to be.

That this has all gone wrong somehow.

*

The new princess has not managed to fit in well at court, and John knows that he is not the only one who looks at her and only sees what might have been. Some days he desperately hopes that she doesn’t realise this. Some days he guiltily wishes that she does, and that she knows that only the King and Queen wanted her here.

It is not entirely the Princess Vivienne’s fault; John expects that she is merely shy and a little unsure of her feet in this new place. John had always assumed that all royal courts are alike – they had certainly seemed to be identical in all the principle features when he was accompanying Ed on his many unfruitful visits in the past. Perhaps John never knew where to look?

He muses on this to Caroline late one night, and she laughs at him until he thwaps her gently with a pillow. When the ensuing tussle has died down, she folds her arms atop his chest and rests her chin atop the little platform she has created to look down upon him with kind amusement.

“Honestly, John, of course it’s different! You were just a visitor, not someone who had to live there forever!”

He rolls his eyes a little in fond acknowledgement of her wisdom. John is a jumped-up servant, and Caroline has always been a lady. Her knowledge of such things will always far outweigh his own. He likes to joke that Caroline married him for his pretty face alone, and she tosses her head back and laughs before solemnly agreeing that he does have a very pretty face.

In truth, her father had wanted far more for his only daughter than a promoted royal bodyguard, but Ed had pulled on all his royal pomp and regal circumstance in speaking privately to the man. John still did not know what was said, but his new father-in-law had apparently been heard defending his new son to some spurned courtly suitor by declaring that the most trusted friend and advisor to the Crown Prince was worth five times that of a petty lord’s worthless son. John had blushed as red as his coat when their chambermaid had confided the incident to Caroline and himself one morning, and his wife had barely waited until they were alone again to tug him back to bed, her face all aglow with pride.

On reflection – and somewhat ironically - it had seemed only natural that their famously happy marriage and almost fairy-tale courtship had been the barrier which prevented the Princess Vivienne from taking to Caroline as a fellow lady at court.

They do not have a chance to meet properly for some time; Caroline was often preoccupied by her duties to the Dowager Queen, growing more frail by the day, but still sharp and witty as ever. Nevertheless, Caroline – a long-time veteran of the court by this time – had tried very hard to welcome the princess and make introductions to ladies of her own age and similar interests. However the princess had been nothing but cold and distant to her for several months before finally cutting Caroline publicly, much to everyone’s dismay.

Caroline was well-liked and kind to everyone; so much so that even her strange yet loving marriage had not dented her connections and influence. The new princess did not much like to speak to those she was not familiar with, and her face was hard and forbidding, discouraging most from trying to speak with her. If Princess Vivienne wished to start a disagreement, there was little doubt as to whom would emerge the victor.

Ed had been furious, and John had needed to smother his own outrage to clasp his friend’s arm and prevent him from speaking in so public a setting as open court. Try as he and Caroline might, John doubted that Ed had calmed appreciably before speaking to his wife in private, and the prince looked no less furious when they joined him for luncheon the next day.

He stabbed at his food, and pushed whatever had survived the initial onslaught around the plate until Caroline took his fork from his hand and gave him a speaking look that demanded answers.

“She thinks you’re my mistress!” Ed looked torn between complete outrage and frank shock, eyes wide and wild as he turned to John’s wife.

They stared at him for a moment in silence before John started to snigger. Caroline reached to smack him lightly on the arm, but he only dodged and exploded into gales of laughter, feeling no contrition whatsoever when Ed and Caroline joined in.

“But _why?!_ ” Caroline seemed as bewildered as John felt, as their giggles subsided.

“I don’t know!” Ed waved a hand, in his distraction nearly unseating Caroline’s new hat. “She kept going on about how she wanted to know the truth, and how foolish I was to try to hide the relationship by marrying you off to John! As if everyone at court didn’t know you two adore each other.”

He stopped then, face abruptly pained. John’s amusement dried up at the reminder that John was luckier in love than Ed is likely to be, especially if his new wife is going to go around accusing his friends of having secret affairs.

Caroline clears her throat in a determined manner, obviously uncomfortable with the silence. “Well, as flattering as it is to be thought fine enough to tempt a prince’s eye, and away from a royal wife no less, Her Majesty the Dowager Queen was very displeased on my behalf as well. I hope that no one tells her of the princess’s mistake; she is unlikely to be kind about it.”

John and Ed pulled identical faces of discomfort.

The Dowager Queen can be as cutting and precisely aimed at one’s weak-points as an assassin’s blade and twice as unpleasant. She’s also very fond of Caroline, sent as she was to court at such a young age and affectionate as she still is with those she trusts. She most certainly will not be kind in Caroline’s defence.

Ed changes the subject with gallantry. “Any prince would be fortunate indeed to secure your affections, Caroline, but I fear that John has me thoroughly outclassed!”

John catches the mischievous twinkle in Ed’s eye and throws a bread roll at him. They all dissolve into giggles again.

The Princess Vivienne’s misconception of their relationship is never brought up again, but John makes sure to be even more affectionate to his wife when the princess is around.

He’s not offended by the implication that he is a substitute stand-in for the prince’s respectability.

Really.

*

John has ever been a calm, cheerful person – servants can be nothing else, indeed – but sometimes John is so very _angry_ about everything.

He might have been a servant, but John has never found a problem he cannot fix at least a little. Not in all his time as Ed’s companion-at-arms. Not until that one.

He had drawn hope from that fact that day, as they rode out after a trail which cooled with every second. He had never failed Ed before, not once! Hadn’t John found Ed’s love last time? Dancing to music only she could hear and holding that famous glass slipper up to the light.

At one time, John would have thought that he would cherish the look of hope and love and happiness in Ed’s eyes when John dragged him half-dressed out to the stables, shoved him onto a horse and told him where to ride. He thought that such a memory would keep him warm on cold nights, that he would tell his children, and Ed’s too, about being the hero of the hour and bringing about a happy ending just like in story-books and bard’s tales.

Now John can hardly bare to think of it, because to do so is to have such an image immediately followed by the utter despair on Ed’s face as they stood shoulder to shoulder looking across the border and knowing that Ed was never going to be able to reach his true love.

John had clasped his friend’s shoulder in silence; words are paltry things and no true comfort in such times. The men drew back, moving away to give their prince some peace, and John has never been so angry as when Ed finally draw in ne long shuddering breath, turned away from the waterside as if the very sight hurt his eyes and sobbed his heart out into John’s shoulder.

Ed had lost his anger at his father by the time they had made the long agonising ride back to the palace. He’d lost his anger and his hope and his spirit, and none of those things ever really came back. John never loses his anger though.

It isn’t fair that he gets to marry his love and Ed, who made that happen, does not.

*

Caroline breathes her good news into his ear one evening just over half a year into their marriage. John is speechless, and she laughs at him a little. He tickles her until she cries for other reasons, and they roll around in the sheets, tussling like children for several moments, happy and gleeful as the children they are going to have.

They are bursting to share the news with Ed when they meet with him for lunch. Ed must have suspected something, for he teases them with other topics for a while, asking them other questions so that they don’t have a chance to get the news out. When John finally snaps and throws an apple at the royal prince’s head to get a word in edgeways, he has one terrified moment when he suddenly thinks that the news might not be welcome. Ed can never have such good news to share in return, John knows, though no one else at court can be trusted with the same knowledge

John and Caroline tried not to flaunt their happiness too much in front of Ed, especially in the beginning. Ed had caught on fast though, and carefully explained that seeing his two friends happy was the only thing he had left to be happy about anymore. Caroline had all but smothered her prince in her embrace, while John had blinked back tears and tried not to sniffle.

This time is no different, and Ed’s delight is only slightly tainted by the torment of his own tragic fate. He claps John on the shoulder and clasps Caroline’s hand in both of his own, eyes filling with happy tears as he teases them that the child needs must be named after _him_ since he was the hero of their story!

“Edward’s a pretty terrible name for a girl, isn’t it?” John grins around a bite of cheese, smothering his profound relief in jokes and food.

Ed waves an imperious hand. “Any child of yours would carry such a name with nothing but distinction, I’ll have you know, John.”

His dignified speech is ruined when Caroline swats at his head and he is forced to duck.

John’s not foolish enough to hope that Ed is going to recover exactly, but he watches Caroline poking him to smile more often (“You need to practice more, I won’t have you scaring the baby when it comes with that long face of yours.”) and he thinks that between his efforts and Caroline, at least Ed will heal enough to be a good king, if not a good husband.

John didn’t know Cinderella for long, but he thinks that this is the least he can do for her in her absence.

*

John’s never going to forgive himself for not following his instincts that night. He and Monty (The Duke of Montague, he ought to say, but Monty always looked horrified whenever he tried, and now John was a knight so he supposed that it was alright?) had watched the Lord Chamberlain and his Majesty talking as Ed triumphally led his lady from the throne room, and they had exchanged worried looks with each other. Nothing good could come from such a conversation they knew.

But he had not listened to the chills running up his neck. Ed had found Cinderella at last, hadn’t he? He’d found her, and persuaded her to marry him – John had teased them on their arrival that it had clearly taken Ed all night to do so, and Cinderella had blushed as pretty as a … as a peach before hiding her face on Ed’s shirtfront – and he had shown her off to the whole court to prove that she was not a dream he had been chasing, but a woman, real and true. Surely there was nothing that could go wrong now? The happy ending had found them all now, had it not?

John should have stood guard at his friend’s love’s door all night, have guarded Ed’s happiness with the same care and vigour with which he had once guarded his life.

Ed never blamed John, putting responsibility solely on his father’s shoulders, but John knows the truth.

He has failed his friend and his prince, and since he can never repair that mistake, he must go on picking up the pieces which his failure has left.


	4. The Step-Mother

It is all utterly intolerable.

Everything.

Bad enough that the little wretch went to the Ball - stealing out of the house _again_ , it seems, would the child never learn to listen? – outshining her own angels in the process and stealing the prince’s heart all for her greedy self. That would have been bad enough!

But no, the little harlot couldn’t manage to follow it all through! To vanish off into the night without a word to anyone! Not so much as a ‘by your leave’ to her darling mother who had taken her in and cared for her without any obligation to do so. It had been _she_ who had kept a roof over the ungrateful urchin’s head and clothes on her back and food on her plate. So what if she had cooked that food herself? Plenty of peasants did that for their whole lives and it seemed to have no ill-effects on the riff-raff, no?

Oh! When Lady Lucrezia thought of what might have been!

Naturally, if Lady Lucrezia had known that her little inherited child would catch the eye of the Crown Prince himself, she would have done things differently.

For one thing, she’d have made sure the little brat loved her just as much as her poor, dear, dead father had, whatever the little miss might have spat at her on the day they buried him. Love was a far better way to bind the useful to you in the long-term, after all; far better than fear or coercion.

She’d have cossetted the child, maybe, dressed her finely and primped her naïve charms into True Beauty. Taught her the elegance and refinement that was so necessary to lead the Royal Court.

Perhaps that was why the child had run away? Naïve charms would never survive in amongst the intrigues and scheming; they must have ripped the child apart.

Lady Lucrezia had few enough friends from her time at court with her first husband, but those she had managed to keep told her things. They said that the prince seemed to have truly _loved_ her little step-daughter (sentimental fool), that he had searched for her _everywhere_ (incompetent too, not that she had looked herself), that she had not _really_ run away, but had been sent away in secret by the king in favour of a politically-advantageous match (it seemed that someone in that family had good sense.)

If that last rumour proved to be true, Lady Lucrezia might never forgive her lord and king, not to her dying day.

Oh, she could appreciate the good sense, of course. Years ago young Isabelle had taken a shine to a young squire of small estate, after all, and she had ruthlessly dismissed the girl’s tears as she crushed the relationship as quickly as possible. Her daughter’s heart had recovered, after all, and so would the prince if he had any sense.

But the logic of such an action was entirely lost upon her when she thought of the advantages to her darling girls if the little brat had only married the prince like she had been so very desperate to do.

To be the step-mother of the princess, eventually of the queen herself! It was an advantage Lady Lucrezia would never have dreamt of! Oh, she had encouraged her darlings before the Ball, of course she had. They were true beauties, after all, and what a fine thing it would have been if the prince’s handsome head had been turned by one or the other of them!

But to have been so close to such a victory – unlooked for though it might have been – and to have it all slip away because of a clever king…

No, Lady Lucrezia did not think she could forgive such a thing.

It was far better to be able to blame the silly chit, really.

Her girls were getting no younger, after all. Lady Lucrezia would continue to look to their futures as best that she could, naturally. But young men of suitable means and breeding were hard enough to find as it was, and the sudden rise and fall of young Cinderella’s fortunes had tainted the family name long after the wretched brat’s disappearance.

Palatine had been taken to court by the Duke of Montague, who had met and remembered her from the Ball, it seemed. Lady Lucrezia had been incandescent with happiness: it was rumoured that the prince forsook his bride’s bed whenever possible, and therefore was likely to die without issue. The Duke was the next in line to the throne and Lady Lucrezia wouldn’t even have to pretend to like the ungrateful wretch when she took her rightful place at court, not with her own flesh-and-blood daughter on the throne as queen!

But the King had blanched so much at the sight of her, clearly someone had made the connection. The princess - Palatine had told her mother later that night, struggling through her tears – had spent the afternoon going out of her way to make Lady Lucrezia’s beloved daughter miserable, clearly needing to vent her frustrations on the nearest thing to Cinderella she could reach. That was a double unkindness the brat had done her family, Lady Lucrezia cursed.

Whatever had happened after the Duke had brought Palatine home that night, he did not call again, and neither did any other suitors for quite some time.

It was all the stupid little chit’s fault, all of it, and yet Lady Lucrezia did not even know where the wretch had gone so that she could express her displeasure about that fact.

It was all intolerable.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, check out my blog for random thoughts on writing, fantasy, dragons and folklore. Also there's a tiny dragon as a guest-star, so that can't be bad!  
> I can be found at: <https://herebeblog.wordpress.com/>


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